Kierkegaard opens his chef d'oeuvre Either/Or with the following epigraph:
Greatness, knowledge, renown,
Friendship, pleasure, possessions,
All is only wind, only smoke:
To say it better, all is nothing.(1)
In this essay, we seek to grasp the existential situation by concentrating a penetrative gaze through to that originary moment in history that was the birth of this unique and defining weltanschaung. Our project hinges on our ability to unconceal and witness that moment as the birth to presence of a novel worldview. We are aware that there are no sharp-cut demarcations in history, even less so in the history of philosophy. But there is a movement akin to the throes of labour, when something new struggles to emerge from the depths of history, borne and precipitated by a crisis of the human condition. We seek to situate that proto-existential moment in the historical and genealogical context of existentialism. Our problematic is two-fold, or rather, two tiered. By locating and encountering the proto-existential mood in its embyonic purity we see existentialism with the freshness of a virgin gaze, so to speak, shod of all the cutaneous paraphernalia and historical accumulation. The perspective of this gaze is a real-world space-time one, that is to say, a conjunction of the historical and the spatial perspectives. The historical perspective unveils/envisions a temporal locus for the figural event of the conception of an epochal idea. All human discourse is made possible by being populated with such figural events; for it is these figural events that mark all the definitive signposts of historical discourse. Without such 'created events' or 'figural figments' discourse would be impossible. These events are the preconditions and constituents of discourse. It cannot, however, be our purpose here to inquire into the foundations and making of discursivity. It is sufficient unto our purpose to indicate the fact of this figural and created foundationism of discursivity, so that we can embark, with a clear conscience and directness of purpose, on the process of unraveling and teasing out the various strands that emanate from this origin and constitute the meaning and Gestalt of existentialism. The word Gestalt is of theoretical and methodological pertinence to our project. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary Gestalt is a structure, configuration, or pattern of biological, or psychological phenomena so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties not derivable by summation of its parts. In the present essay we will mainly scrutinize certain special psychological phenomena peculiar to the nineteenth and post nineteenth century man and extract the philosophical outlook germinating out of the thus delineated psychological state. Existentialism was seeded in the nineteenth century European mind and even though every idea has a history, each member in this history of ideas has its own singular epoch and eventuates from the dialectical interplay of historical forces. This configuration of the attributes of the concept of existentialism fits the Gestalt paradigm with the historico-psychological forces functioning as the causative agents and the newly emergent hermeneutic of the existential weltanschaung as the resultant functional unit integrated out of these same constitutive historico-psychological ingredients. These forces are inscribed as historico-psychological as the psychological states flowing out into the existential worldview are but products of historical forces, as are all psychological states. Going by the testimony of the three figures synonymous with the dawn of existentialism and attributed with having played a seminal role in its genesis, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky, it is more than anything, a psychological state. The epigraph to Kierkegaard's Either/Or, quoted above, is connotative of the period and its mood of nihilism, a mood whose harbinger was the new breed of men, the nihilists, prophesied so druidly by Nietzsche. For the first time man was face to face with the abyss of nothingness and unmeaningness as the new normal of the life world.
The history of the world and that of its religion and science until the advent of existentialism was the history of man's reason. History after all is the reflection of the universe in man's eyes. And universe until that moment had been reason spatio-temporalized. There was meaning to life and the world. But there came a moment in this history of man when his life and universe no longer made sense to him. Everything became a project in unmeaningness. Passions, which had been subservient to reason until then, were liberated and let loose upon the universe without a reason to regulate them. Consequent upon this reign of unreason was a high irrationalism of the universe.
Is reason then alone baptized,
are the passions pagan?
Reason was both Christian and scientific, but the passions were ostracized out of the realm. It was then discovered, out of sheer necessity, that the passions had a role, a vital role, to play in the creation, as opposed to determination, of meaning. For instance, it is intuition, rather than logical ratiocination, to aver that "the inner is the outer and the outer inner". For what is the middle term to negotiate the binaries of the inner and the outer and thus arrive at their equivalence? What infers the presence of the inner which, by definition, is imperceptible to the senses and thus creates the binary opposition of the inner and the outer? What is even the ratiocinative faculty but passions at work, as enunciated by Nietzsche, Freud, and modern psychology? Passions are not pagan and the inner is not always the outer. The outer sometimes harbors inside it somewhere a secret and that is the first instance of the asymmetry of the irrational. A lopsidedness of order that is the disorder of the aesthetic and that upsets the equivalence of things. There has always been this secret at the heart of the order of things. A secret that is the source of all the pleasure that life affords and that lends meaning to existence, despite reason.
Greatness, knowledge, renown,
Friendship, pleasure, possessions,
All is only wind, only smoke:
To say it better, all is nothing.(1)
In this essay, we seek to grasp the existential situation by concentrating a penetrative gaze through to that originary moment in history that was the birth of this unique and defining weltanschaung. Our project hinges on our ability to unconceal and witness that moment as the birth to presence of a novel worldview. We are aware that there are no sharp-cut demarcations in history, even less so in the history of philosophy. But there is a movement akin to the throes of labour, when something new struggles to emerge from the depths of history, borne and precipitated by a crisis of the human condition. We seek to situate that proto-existential moment in the historical and genealogical context of existentialism. Our problematic is two-fold, or rather, two tiered. By locating and encountering the proto-existential mood in its embyonic purity we see existentialism with the freshness of a virgin gaze, so to speak, shod of all the cutaneous paraphernalia and historical accumulation. The perspective of this gaze is a real-world space-time one, that is to say, a conjunction of the historical and the spatial perspectives. The historical perspective unveils/envisions a temporal locus for the figural event of the conception of an epochal idea. All human discourse is made possible by being populated with such figural events; for it is these figural events that mark all the definitive signposts of historical discourse. Without such 'created events' or 'figural figments' discourse would be impossible. These events are the preconditions and constituents of discourse. It cannot, however, be our purpose here to inquire into the foundations and making of discursivity. It is sufficient unto our purpose to indicate the fact of this figural and created foundationism of discursivity, so that we can embark, with a clear conscience and directness of purpose, on the process of unraveling and teasing out the various strands that emanate from this origin and constitute the meaning and Gestalt of existentialism. The word Gestalt is of theoretical and methodological pertinence to our project. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary Gestalt is a structure, configuration, or pattern of biological, or psychological phenomena so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties not derivable by summation of its parts. In the present essay we will mainly scrutinize certain special psychological phenomena peculiar to the nineteenth and post nineteenth century man and extract the philosophical outlook germinating out of the thus delineated psychological state. Existentialism was seeded in the nineteenth century European mind and even though every idea has a history, each member in this history of ideas has its own singular epoch and eventuates from the dialectical interplay of historical forces. This configuration of the attributes of the concept of existentialism fits the Gestalt paradigm with the historico-psychological forces functioning as the causative agents and the newly emergent hermeneutic of the existential weltanschaung as the resultant functional unit integrated out of these same constitutive historico-psychological ingredients. These forces are inscribed as historico-psychological as the psychological states flowing out into the existential worldview are but products of historical forces, as are all psychological states. Going by the testimony of the three figures synonymous with the dawn of existentialism and attributed with having played a seminal role in its genesis, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky, it is more than anything, a psychological state. The epigraph to Kierkegaard's Either/Or, quoted above, is connotative of the period and its mood of nihilism, a mood whose harbinger was the new breed of men, the nihilists, prophesied so druidly by Nietzsche. For the first time man was face to face with the abyss of nothingness and unmeaningness as the new normal of the life world.
The history of the world and that of its religion and science until the advent of existentialism was the history of man's reason. History after all is the reflection of the universe in man's eyes. And universe until that moment had been reason spatio-temporalized. There was meaning to life and the world. But there came a moment in this history of man when his life and universe no longer made sense to him. Everything became a project in unmeaningness. Passions, which had been subservient to reason until then, were liberated and let loose upon the universe without a reason to regulate them. Consequent upon this reign of unreason was a high irrationalism of the universe.
Is reason then alone baptized,
are the passions pagan?
Reason was both Christian and scientific, but the passions were ostracized out of the realm. It was then discovered, out of sheer necessity, that the passions had a role, a vital role, to play in the creation, as opposed to determination, of meaning. For instance, it is intuition, rather than logical ratiocination, to aver that "the inner is the outer and the outer inner". For what is the middle term to negotiate the binaries of the inner and the outer and thus arrive at their equivalence? What infers the presence of the inner which, by definition, is imperceptible to the senses and thus creates the binary opposition of the inner and the outer? What is even the ratiocinative faculty but passions at work, as enunciated by Nietzsche, Freud, and modern psychology? Passions are not pagan and the inner is not always the outer. The outer sometimes harbors inside it somewhere a secret and that is the first instance of the asymmetry of the irrational. A lopsidedness of order that is the disorder of the aesthetic and that upsets the equivalence of things. There has always been this secret at the heart of the order of things. A secret that is the source of all the pleasure that life affords and that lends meaning to existence, despite reason.
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